The effect of focused instruction on young children’s singing accuracy

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of daily singing instruction on the singing accuracy of young children and whether accuracy differed across four singing tasks. In a pretest-posttest design over seven months we compared the singing accuracy of kindergarteners in a school receiving daily singing instruction from a music specialist to a control school receiving no curricular music instruction. All children completed four singing tasks at the beginning and end of the study: matching single pitches, matching intervals, matching short patterns, and singing a familiar song from memory. We found that both groups showed improvement on the pitch-matching tasks from pretest to posttest, but the experimental group demonstrated significantly more improvement. Performance on the familiar song task did not improve for either group. Students achieved the highest accuracy scores when matching intervals. Regular singing instruction seems to accelerate the development of accurate singing for young children, but the improvement was evident only in the pitch-matching tasks. It is possible that singing skill development proceeds from pitch-matching to the more difficult task of singing a song from memory. If so, this has implications for how we structure singing instruction in the early grades.

Task-Based Variability in Children’s Singing Accuracy

“…After eight weeks the remedial group indicated better improvement of single pitch and interval production and their vocal range improved overall, but song singing did not. More recent samples of typical kindergarteners confirmed these findings (Apfelstadt, 1984;Demorest et al, 2012;Welch et al, 1997).…”

“…Most importantly, and related to task difficulty, Van Zee questioned how much pitch matching tasks correlate with song singing tasks. She found little-to-no correlation and like the kindergarteners studied by Demorest and Nichols (2012), suggested these tasks may not measure the same construct (or at least not exactly the same combination of component skills). Perhaps song singing is a more complex task, which is why song singing was not shown to improve over six months' time in the kindergarten sample (and also Apfelstadt, 1984), but pitch matching did improve.…”

“…Singing accuracy and melodic perception skills have been improved in selected samples of both "normal" and "poor pitch" students (Apfelstadt, 1984), and certain abilities like pitch matching have been shown to improve across the school year while others like song singing do not (Demorest & Nichols, 2012;Welch, Sergeant, & White, 1997).…”

“…Performance on pitch matching and song singing has been found to be moderately correlated in a sample of kindergarteners (Demorest & Nichols, 2012) and highly correlated in a sample of adults (Pfordresher et al, 2010). Pfordresher and Brown (2007) suggested that single pitch, interval, and pattern tasks vary in terms of complexity because of the number of unique pitches they contain and varied in memory demand because of the total number of notes that they contain.…”

“…The review of literature indicated that the use of various singing tasks may affect indicators of student performance, but that few studies have compared the results of multiple singing tasks in the same sample of children (e.g., Demorest & Nichols, 2012;Roberts & Davies, 1975) or in adults (e.g., Pfordresher & Brown, 2007;Wise & Sloboda, 2008). An understanding of how singing tasks affect assessment results is important for developing singing tests for music classrooms.…”